Dawn was behind him, coffee was in front of him, the shadows were slowly shrinking from the street and the blood under his nails had finally washed out.
And then everything was ruined when someone walked into the building.
“Hey there, Trevor!” said Steven Beecher, or at least the bright shiny smile attached to Steven Beecher’s face that he’d appointed to do all the talking for him.
“Hello,” said Trevor, and he meant it, but mostly the first syllable.
“Boy, it’s a cold one out there, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Trevor, who’d spent half an hour unloading a truck in it, after spending half an hour shovelling out the truck in the first place.
“Gosh! Geez. Good thing you’ve got the new hire to help out, eh? Anyways I was just getting up for a nice Saturday breakfast and hahahaha would you look at me silly clunch I am I didn’t have anything for the eggs and toast and I was wondering if-”
Trevor hefted up a nice big pack of bacon.
“Oh there you have it, got it before I even ask for it! Thank you! Oh, and it’s nice and streaky too.”
“Had to trim a lot of fat from it,” grumbled Trevor.
“Ah, that’s no great problem – heck, I’d take more if you’d left it on. Nothing wrong with a bit of fat, as long as it isn’t where you sit eh hahahahaha?”
“Haha,” said Trevor.
“Haha!”
“Haha.”
“Hah!” concluded Steven, and he paid his money and walked out the door and left Trevor to do more of the real work, which he was grateful for because his cleaver hand was itchy.
***
The coffee was gone too soon, as it always was, and soon Trevor was busy skinning, jointing, gutting, chopping, and – when there was nothing better to do (which wasn’t often, mercifully, given the size of this particular carcass) – measuring and weighing and labelling.
It always made his fingers itch. He preferred to work with his hands, and he preferred those hands be dismantling something. It was soothing.
What WASN’T soothing was the doorbell. He had thought to change that for something less jarring, but then the first thing to disturb him would be a customer loudly clearing their throat at the counter like this one was, and that was an even worse shock to the system.
“Hexcuse me,” harrumphed the customer in question, and oh no, oh dear, it was far too damned early in the day to deal with Esmeralda, both for Trevor’s sanity and for the universe. Why was she out of her home before noon? “There happens to be a paying customher heah.”
Trevor grunted, which must have come out servile enough because she didn’t comment.
“Two prime rib steaks, if you hwould be so kind.”
And as luck would have it, those had been the last two things he’d removed, fresh and red and beautiful, shining from their fleshy prison. He gave them a wipe and a weigh and a wrapping of brown paper that hid all their glory from the world, and then they were handed over into the care of Mrs. Esmeralda Platterton, who held them as if they were raw roadkill.
“Perhaps, if one might give a hword of hadvice, you might consider hasking your staff to hassist you by minding the front counter. Good day,” she said in the least sincere voice imaginable, and then she was gone.
And those had been the only good steaks he’d gotten from that damned animal too.
***
Lunch was cold and clammy and hauntingly immobile and halfway through it Trevor was interrupted by Matthew Gunderson and his sixteen thousand pictures of his grandson, Stewie, who was staying with them while his parents were out doing something Trevor wasn’t interested in.
“-And here’s Stewie coming off the bus, and getting on the bus – oh sorry, those two were backwards – and here he is eating dinner, and oh right I was going to get some dinner for him. Do you have something for that?”
“What do you want?” said Trevor, and if they were the first words he’d managed in twenty minutes they probably should’ve come out more practiced and less like a bear growling.
“Oh, I’m not really sure, you know. Maybe some liver? It’d be good for Stewie. Or no, we should really get tongue; he likes it in his sandwiches. Or a steak – no, too pricey; he’ll make a fuss. I haven’t done kidney pie in a while but-”
“A bit of everything,” said Trevor rudely, and dumped some sausages on the scale in front of them.
“Oh yes! How clever! My, you always were the smartest boy in town, weren’t you? Yes, a bit of everything. My word, Stewie’ll like that. A good chuckle! Thank you, thank you! Have a nice day!”
Trevor bit through his tongue and managed something that sounded like ‘you’re welcome’ and then put away his knife before it went somewhere impolite again.
***
Scarce three minutes afterwards the door rang while Trevor was packaging up the last of the soup bones. He looked up and for the first time that day he didn’t feel his lips want to roll back over his teeth. Trevor didn’t mind Shannon nearly as much as some of his other customers, even if she made him nervous now and then. Her eyes moved like flies, and her brain was like a quick cold chisel.
“Saw Gunderson walk away with a bagful and it looked like he was happy,” she explained. “Fresh meat on the weekend? Lucky, lucky, lucky. Got any chops left?”
“One or two,” he said. “A bit too much fat.”
“I can deal. I know you’re a perfectionist, but man, trust people when they tell you that’s no great crime. And I won’t look a gift butchering in the mouth.”
Trevor grunted agreement in a way that was sincere and pulled out his brown paper and string. As he worked she looked around the shop with that quick, critical gaze of hers. “Where’s your help?”
“My what?”
“Your help, the guy who started last week. Big hefty lad, but I’d reckon some of that would turn to muscle if he kept at it, eh?”
She was probably right, if Trevor was any judge of meat and bone. “Gone for good.”
“What? He’s quit already? When’d he leave?”
“Just missed him.”
“Wow, quit already, huh? And here I thought you’d have finally found someone that could make the cut. You can’t find good help anywhere these days, can you?”
Trevor shrugged. “If you work at it hard enough, I think just about everyone’s got something useful in them.”
***
Except for the soup bones. Nobody bought the damned things, even as dog treats.